Tag Archive: dystopia


EDCMOOC WEEK 3 IMAGE ACTIVITY

In week 3 of the E-Learning & Digital Cultures MOOC .  students have been invited to create an image that represents any one of the themes encountered in the course so far.

I’m not entirely sure if cropping my Flickr photos counts as being sufficiently creative but I’ve been going through my past shots of graffiti and street art looking picture that fit this category.

My favourite is this one I took in a side street in Ravenna, Italy which I think serves to counter balance the dystopian notion that machines are taking over our world.

if robots are invested with human characteristics, perhaps they can feel lonely too.

This yellow bot certainly looks isolated and in need of love.

Perhaps the true fear we should address is not  that machines are becoming too powerful but that human beings are too distrustful of the idea that technology can be a force for good.

Scene form the animation : Bendito Machine III

Scene form the animation : Bendito Machine III

Technological or Media Determinism by Daniel Chandler is the core text for week one of the MOOC  – E-learning and Digital Cultures run by Edinburgh University  through Coursera.

Aside from ‘determinism’ it introduces us to other terms ‘reductionism’, ‘reification’ and ‘universalism’, presumably because these are words that will recur in other study texts.

The key question raised is whether technology’s obvious influence on modern society  is positive (utopian) or negative (dystopian).

The debate about determinism, reminds me of the age-old cliché that money is the root of all evil. It could be, and has been, argued that money is innocent and technology is neutral yet this doesn’t stop many people dreaming of a simpler world in which neither seemed to wield so much power. Continue reading

CHANNEL FOUR IN UTOPIA

Jessica Hyde (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) is a blast in Utopia

There are plenty of things to admire in Channel 4’s slick new drama Utopia written by Dennis Kelly. I won’t attempt a plot summary; suffice to say it involves a ‘MacGuffin‘ of global proportions and plenty of fuel for conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Episode 1 opened with two cold-blooded killers in a comic shop and closed with a gruesome torture scene. This level of brutality will put off the squeamish but this is really nothing we haven’t seen in any Tarantino movie or in The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men. I don’t really see what all the fuss it about. It’s shocking, of course, but that’s the nature of violence whether on or off-screen. If it’s right for the story, and it is here, then it is justified. Continue reading